Summary

In this fifth section, Césaire turns his attention to the Chants de Maldoror, a nineteenth-century poetic novel in French by Comte de Lautréamont. Césaire seeks to draw readers’ attention to different passages in the Comte de Lautréamont such as the one involving the mine of lice—a scene that Césaire reads as a condemnation of the evil power of gold and money hoarding.

Next, Césaire turns to Monsieur Roger Callois, who preaches the supposedly objective fact that the West invented science, knowledge, and logic. To do so, Callois ignores the fact that arithmetic and geometry were invented in Egypt and that astronomy was discovered by the Assyrians. Callois next credits Western civilization with creating ethics, proper religion, and finally, ethnography in the form of museums. Césaire rejects the idea that museums are symbols of civilizational greatness...